A CHAPTER OF WAR.

WHEN the sun sets behind the long line of the Aqueduct of Marly, a
profound peace falls upon one of the most beautiful home prospects in the world.
An ancient village lying in a fold of the hills behind Mont Valerien sends up a
faint smoke from its chimneys; the first spurs of the hills of Normandy can be
seen, line beyond line, in the far distance, and the great flat plain through
which the Seine winds and doubles is dotted with the lights of innumerable
villages—the leafy suburbs lying between Paris and St. Germains. Paris itself is
unseen, but a walk through the woods brings within range the electric gleam of
the summit of the Eiffel Tower shining like a star. To a dweller in the village
the exceeding antiquity of every association, covering full a thousand years,
affects the imagination with a silent background of past generations. Yet
page: 180 over this cluster of dwellings, this house,
these steep green banks and groves of secular chestnuts, rolled the full tide of
war five‐and‐twenty years ago.

Looking back to the early months of 1870, I can recall no portent, no slightest
cloud upon the horizon. Invasion seemed as far from us in France as it seems
from us in England now; and France was very prosperous. Commerce made no
complaint; the corn and the wine and the oil of that land of many climates were
poured forth into the markets as from an abundant cornucopia. Literature was
still sending out fresh shoots, and Victor Hugo survived as a magnificent
oak‐tree of the past. There were scarcely any beggars to be seen, and the
innumerable works of charity were unvexed by opposition. Near our village the
Empress had specially favoured the great convalescent hospital at Le Vesinet,
and omnibuses rolled constantly to and fro between its gates and those of the
Paris hospitals. So far as I could see the huge machines of the State worked
smoothly: we had great doctors in the wards and great lawyers at the Bar. Not
only was there an Imperial
follow‐
page: 181 ing
following
of unquestioned zeal, but the Opposition numbered in its ranks men
such as a Thiers and a Gambetta, and a great following of respectable and
thoughtful men of the professional classes. Parties, however much opposed, were
of a firm consistence, and political aspirations were reasonably expressed and
definite in shape. The household whose experiences I am about to describe had
then been settled in the village for forty years. They had bought houses and a
little land, and children had grown to maturity and settled in life. The
surviving elders, who had been very young under the First Empire, were not
Imperialist, but were personally attached to the House of Orleans; and the men
of the next succeeding generation had interests connected with the Second
Empire, and one of them, who ten years later occupied a public office of
eminence, was a consistent Republican of a moderate type. The growing lads had
of course taken their baccalauréat at Paris
Lycées, and one of them had just won the
Premier Prix of the year 1867, and was therefore exempt from all military
service. So that this family might fairly be considered to
page: 182 be in touch with the varied elements of French
life.

But there were two things which they did not know. They had no social link with
the Tuilleries or Compiègne, and the low thunder of the democratic growl was
unheard by one and all. Once, two years before the war, the English member of
this family had dined in Paris at the house of an Inspector of Schools who had
risen from the ranks, and at this table there arose a whisper of a likely rising
among the workmen of Lyons, a whisper nervously hushed, and which was until
later forgotten by the hearer. Who remembers the sheet lightning of the previous
evening in the broad light of a stormy day?

In the spring of 1870 the sense of security was exceptionally strong, for the
Emperor, vexed by parliamentary opposition, and aware of smouldering embers in
the great towns of which the outer world knew nothing, called a Plébiscite in the month of May. The result was an
overwhelming vote of confidence. We happened to be at La Rochelle on the day of
the vote, and spent the evening at a villa on the shore
belong‐
page: 183 ing
belonging
to the mayor of the town. One of the official tellers hurried out with
the yet unpublished result. He whispered in the ear of our hostess the one word
“Splendide!” in a tone of the deepest
exultation. And from every quarter of France during that week came up similar
returns from all the Mairies. I have never doubted the essential veracity of
that popular vote, which counted by millions, and which no tampering could have
caused to swerve in an appreciable degree.

It is not true that provincial France distrusted the Empire. Whatever may have
been the state of feeling among the workmen of the great towns, no one who
really knows the departments of that immense country can imagine that the great
wine‐growers in the south, or the farmers of La Beauce, or the fishers of
Brittany desired a change of government. France is so very much larger than
England, and its farming peasants have so great a stake in the soil, that they
form a huge, steady, horizontal mass of workers, up at four in the morning and
in bed by nine in the evening, devoted to their children and to the accumulation
of five‐franc pieces or coupons de
page: 184rente, which are four‐pound divisions of the
National Debt, and constitute an immense savings bank, reposing on the stability
of public institutions. These French millions have less to complain of than any
other labouring millions in Europe, and in spite of difficulties in
manufacturing centres, and in the Parliament sitting in Paris, it is difficult
to believe that the shock would in our generation have come from within if it
had not previously come from without. Never for twenty years did Napoleon the
Third appear to sit more firmly on his throne than in May, 1870.

The month of June was very hot; the temperature of the north of France,
unsoftened by the Gulf Stream, is more acute in heat and cold than that of our
island. The shutters on the south side of the house were all closed, we
literally barricaded out the sun, and sat in a small strip of garden to the
north, the maids and the ladies sewing and reading in the profound stillness.
The white fruit blossoms had fallen from the apple and pear trees, the Spanish
chestnuts were filling out their crop, and nothing more wildly improbable could
have been
sug‐
page: 185 gested
suggested
than that the one or the other should be plucked and eaten by armed
warriors of another nation, with spiked helmets and the accents of a tongue
absolutely unknown to our people. Then came the Hohenzollern incident, which did
not seem much to concern us; and then the half‐ironical quarrel of the
ambassadors, which as told in the newspapers read like the dramatic insult:—

“I, sir?”

“Yes, you, sir!”

And then all in a moment the unlikely thing happened, and war was declared. But
though the telegrams were read with eager interest, they did not seem to
immediately concern the village. The coffee was roasted as usual out of doors,
perfuming the air with an odour which is one of the most characteristic of rural
France. French nursery rhymes were sung in the shrill accents of Tarbes, and the
village crier delivered his usual warning about mad dogs. We knew that the
French troops had shot across the frontier on their way to Berlin, and one of
the newspapers published a map of the seat of war, which we pinned up, and on
which the advance was daily marked in
page: 186 blue
paint. Then came anxious letters from London—“You do not know what is happening.
Come back, come back, and bring your belongings.” But it seemed useless to
dislodge a very complicated household of old people and young children, and
servants who were practically Basques; and so the days passed on, and July was
out, and Saturday the 7th of August dawned upon us—the last peaceful day we were
to know for many a month.

This Saturday evening stands out in my memory because of a visit from Paris. A
very young man, not yet twenty‐one, the “Premier Prix,” who, as I have said, was
thereby exempt from conscription, came out to dinner; and an hour later the
heavy shutters were unbarred, and the windows of the drawing‐room thrown open on
the balcony. The fading sunset filled the room in the cool of the evening, and a
little child lay asleep in a cot while the servants were dining. It was a time
of special stillness; but that sun had set on the battle‐field of Wœrth, the
first great defeat of the war. MacMahon was wounded, and the sons of many
mothers lay dead before their time.

page: 187

This news did not reach us till 8 o’clock the next morning, and then it came
thirty miles across country viâ Versailles,
although we were much nearer to Paris. It had been brought by the late train
overnight to a still lonelier village near Mont l’hèry, by a wealthy gentleman
connected with the Paris Bourse, and travelled in an omnibus starting at six
o’clock in the morning from Mont l’hèry to our neighbourhood. I doubt if the
dread reality appeared in the morning newspapers until twenty‐four hours
later.

We knew, then, on the Sunday morning that the tide had turned, and that the
Germans were chasing the French. Still, not a soul believed that they would get
to Paris, or that the zone of country in which we lay could be in the smallest
danger; and for three weeks we remained quietly, trusting absolutely to the
great battle which was to be fought between Paris and the frontier. Meanwhile,
the young child was baptized in the village church, and the youthful cousin and
godfather came in the new uniform of a Garde Mobile. All the men under forty
were being enrolled in some volunteer corps.

All through August the Germans seemed to
page: 188 us to
be not so much advancing as concentrating in huge masses between us and the
frontier. They were still a hundred miles away, and I cannot now remember what
gave the first bad alarm; but one day an order was given to make ready for the
blowing up of all the bridges on the Seine outside Paris. This was afterwards
said to have been absolutely useless. The Germans were coming from the east, the
Seine running from Paris to the sea turns north and west, doubling like a
riband, and is so comparatively narrow that it could oppose small hindrance to
the passage of troops. But the order was given, and our old stone bridge at
Bougival was to be prepared by excavating a huge hole in the central buttress
and the filling of the same with powder. This sight for the first time struck
terror into the country people; and as we went on the following day down the
steep hill, a mile in length, between our house and the river, we found
literally every woman in Bougival sitting on her doorstep crying, with her
children round her—not only the poorer inhabitants, but the most respectable
shop‐keepers and bourgeois were in the street, filled with a prevision of
what
page: 189 was really coming, for three weeks
later every soul was turned out of house and home and Bougival evacuated in four
hours. Meantime we watched the men working at the hole in the bridge, the first
symbol of the coming ruin.

We now began to feel it unwise for a family containing very old and very young
members to remain in an isolated house on the outskirts of a village absolutely
without defence, and, strange to say, we made up our minds to move into Paris,
and all our neighbours who had apartments in the city did the same; but this was
not easily accomplished. Some fresh panic struck the general courage on the 27th
of August, and on the 28th, St. Augustine’s Day, and a Sunday, high mass was
said as usual at ten o’clock, and in the afternoon everybody who could procure a
vehicle got to the railway station of St. Cloud, a distance of five miles, at
four o’clock. There the scene was most extraordinary. No luggage could be taken,
and the terrified crowd was dressed with the usual precision of the French on
Sunday. Nobody showed any panic in their outward attire. Streams of well‐dressed
people came to the
page: 190 station from all sides, the
train was hopelessly late, the service disorganized with the strain. The tired
children cried, and when at last the train came up, the people were packed in as
best could be done, and we steamed away to Paris; our boxes with personal
luggage were brought in next day. Everything else had to be left to its fate;
that is to say, the house was put into complete order, securely barred and
locked, and the keys deposited with the village schoolmaster. We were by this
time aware that the dozen dwellings of the gentry would be occupied, if ever the
German army approached Paris, but nobody knew anything about the customs of war,
or had any notion of havoc being wrought by regular troops. It is amazing now to
reflect upon that extreme ignorance. In any case, however, it would have been
hopeless to attempt any sort of guard, for every valid man was enrolled in some
corps, and the farmers and gardeners and tradespeople of the locality were all
too fearful for their own property to pay any attention to ours.

So we went into Paris, to a small apartment near the Luxembourg, where, with a
sigh of
page: 191 relief, we felt ourselves perfectly
safe! And an English lady, who was in very weak health, told me that she sat
under the trees in the Luxembourg with a Tauchnitz volume of Miss Yonge’s “Daisy
Chain”; she felt it soothing to her nerves!

But this delusion did not last many days. A regiment of young mobiles who had
been stationed somewhere in the Eastern Departments, were returned upon Paris.
They marched through the streets looking thoroughly tired and depressed, and
made more impression on their fellow‐citizens than a hundred telegrams from the
seat of war. Urgent letters from England implored us to come over without delay,
and the French newspapers told us of the victualling of Paris and the closing of
the railways. As I look back on that five days, the last we were to see of
Imperial Paris, I wish that we had taken one more glance at the Tuilleries—had
walked once again round the Hotel de Ville! But every hour was taken up with
inexorable family duties, and we had to get away by a line we had never
travelled before; for the Northern Railway was no longer available. It was late
on the Friday evening when our party of three elders and two
page: 192 young children got off from the station of St.
Lazare, and as we passed the line of the fortifications, bands of navvies were
piling earth upon the road, leaving only the one line of rails on which our
train rolled. Their bent heads in the fading sunset was the last we saw of Paris
and its people for many a long month. We embarked at Havre for Southampton, and
as we passed through a wicket, which must have been put up to check the stream
of passengers passing on to the steamer, one of our party vexatiously gave in
the dark a ten‐franc piece instead of half a franc to the toll‐man. By this time
it was past midnight, and Saturday the 3rd of September. At Southampton we found
the German vessels in the harbour dressed out with flags in honour of Sedan!

I will now return to the village and to the silent, dark house where we had left
so many treasures. It may perhaps be said, with astonishment, why were they left
there, since we had had so long a warning of the Prussian advance? It seems as
if we might have filled up the Paris apartments with our household goods.
Assuredly, if we had had any conception
page: 193 of
what war means, we should have done our utmost to get a van, and to place at
least the pictures in safety. But while we did not dream of spoliations, and
believed that the worst which could happen would be the billeting of German
officers in the house, it would, unless we had taken the alarm in the very
beginning of August, have been extremely difficult to get the larger pictures
conveyed twelve miles into Paris. I was not the actual mistress of the house,
and the real and most dear mistress was in acute anxiety for her grandsons,
exposed to constant danger; and for the younger children, who might have been
caught in some place where they would not be able to get proper food, and, above
all, milk. So many children were thus sacrificed in the siege of Paris. Their
number will never be known. But what might have been undoubtedly saved were the
miniatures and bronzes; and in particular two of the former, which had been
given over into my care. Their date was about 1750, and their subjects in full
costume. I had pinned them by their faded loops of ribbon to the velvet border
of a mirror in the drawing‐room on the day they came from
page: 194 an old house in the provinces. It is a sore vexation
to me to think that I packed up the silver spoons and forgot these treasured
great‐great‐grandparents. Nay, still more astounding was it that during the week
we spent in Paris, one of the servants (they were sisters, and extremely
intelligent women from the south) went out to the village, walking for many
miles; and after assuring herself that all was right and safe within the house,
she filled a large clothes basket with our apples and pears, which it vexed her
frugal soul (she was the cook) to leave wasting on the trees. She then cast
about how to get them into Paris, and thought herself very fortunate to find a
washerwoman with a cart. The two women hoisted up the basket, and then jogged
back to Paris in a leisurely way!

Of the other houses in the village summary mention can be made. The Chateau, a
noble old pile of Louis the 14th’s date, was left with servants, and ultimately
used to lodge an Etât Majeur. It was not ill‐treated. A large handsome villa on
the summit of the hill was quite spoilt internally. A small house belonging to a
relative was occupied, knocked about, but not
page: 195
destroyed; but the house next to this, where I remember an old lady with a white
cat and much handsome Indian china, was entirely gutted. From the floor of the
salon, where the great tall Aladdin jars
had proudly stood, the visitor looked up to the roof, with a view of the three
fireplaces left in the wall one above the other.

I do not know by which route the Germans came into the village, whether by the
lower road from Bougival, or by the upper road from Versailles; but the date was
the 19th of September, when the gardens are in gorgeous array, and the woods are
untouched. I only know that they must have fetched the keys of our house from
the schoolmaster, and that they started with good intentions, for the commanding
officer caused an inventory to be taken of everything in the house. Sixty
soldiers were lodged in it, who must have indeed been in tight quarters. The
officer settled into one of the two largest bedrooms; he had the drawing‐room
curtains brought upstairs to drape his broad window; he also transferred the
drawing‐room clock to his mantelshelf, and to this we owe its preservation. Even
the large bell glass
page: 196 which protected it was
unbroken, when a smaller clock of white marble and ormolu was broken to pieces
with a hammer, and the works taken away. To this unknown officer I feel that we
owe gratitude for his good intentions, though he was in the sequel quite unable
to carry them out, for it seems that the troops were constantly shifted.

When the German army had been in occupation on our hills for about a month, the
sortie of the 13th of October took place. So far as we are able to understand
what happened, the French poured out of Paris by way of Rueil and Mont Valerien,
and met the Prussians somewhere near Bougival, from which all the inhabitants
had been summarily sent away in the course of an afternoon. They were given four
hours in which to pack and go. The French seem to have surged up through the
steep little town, and to have fought desperately on the broad road below our
house. The four nuns who keep our village school stuck gallantly to their
dwelling, which they turned into a hospital. They were respectfully treated by
the German soldiers, and the good women took in the wounded of both sides. Sœur
Marie told me afterwards that fifteen legs
page: 197 were amputated in one night. In our cemetery is a
lonely grave, marked only with the initials and the regimental number of three
German soldiers, and with the fatal date, the 13th of October. I believe this
was the one occasion on which there was actual desperate fighting in our
immediate neighbourhood, though bombs came flying over the village, and one shot
by Mont Valerien whizzed over miles of tree‐tops and fell on a small room on the
ground floor of the Chateau. The staff officer who sat writing at a bureau threw
himself flat upon the floor, and while the window, the mantelshelf, and yards of
the wall flew into splinters, he was unhurt.

Week after week went by, the scarlet geraniums died in the garden, the vine
leaves became scanty on the wall, the frost of late autumn deepened in
intensity, and the troops packed into our house began to suffer from cold. They
cut away for firewood the upper part of an outside staircase which was sheltered
under the deep eaves of a chalet standing on part of our ground; and then, when
they wanted three little attic rooms under the roof, they set up a tree against
the wall and climbed up like bears
page: 198 at the Zoo.
They wrenched an arm off several chairs, as handy to light up the fires, and
they piled up such a quantity of wood in the fireplace of the drawing‐room that
the parquet was literally charred in a great
semicircle, and it was a miracle that on the day this happened the whole house
was not burnt down. Another day they wrenched off a dressing‐room door, and a
great piece of the wall came down with it. The village doctor, who remained
through the whole time, told us afterwards that jorums of brandy were served out
to the men in the worst of the weather. This filled his French medical mind with
astonishment, and perhaps accounts for the strange things which occurred. For
instance, they tore away one marble jamb of the dining‐room mantel, and with it
they appeared to have pounded something on the tiled floor. They burnt the
cupboard doors, and they carefully extracted every map of France wherever they
found one, particularly from Murray’s Handbook in which were several! But I
think that the strangest record of their presence was the condition of a small
chandelier brought from Vienna by my dear friend the author of “Gossip
page: 199 of the Century.” It was of Bohemian glass, a
bowl with pendants, and very prettily coloured. Being of small size, it hung
high on a hook in the centre of the ceiling. I found the pendants broken and the
bowl intact! What sort of strange popgun had been employed by the idle troops,
and what wonderful marksmen they must have been!

That our house was substantially preserved, was owing, I believe, to the presence
of Dr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times at the headquarters
at Versailles, to whom I wrote begging for his intercession. In spite of the
strange ruin which fell upon our interior, not a single mirror was broken, nor
were the pictures stolen with one exception. But a magnificent portrait en pied now in the French Gallery of the
Louvre was stabbed five times on the black velvet robe, and another smaller
portrait of a venerable ancestress was badly scratched by being wedged against a
broken window to keep out the draught. Our fruit trees were not cut down, and a
general intention had obtained of not gutting us for firewood! The
mischief was of a smaller kind, and infinite in detail. For
page: 200 instance, a polished bed of walnut wood was scarred
with innumerable fine cuts, and on our return we wondered who had ornamented it,
till we learned that the officers invariably lay down “booted and spurred.” More
intentional, on the part of some idle trooper, was the running of a sharp knife
up the kind face of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on an engraving given by herself. It
took the exact middle of the nose in perfect accuracy. As to the books, they
were torn in an extraordinary manner. A large volume of biographies of literary
ladies of all countries, executed in America and sent over to France by
enthusiastic friends, was torn, defaced, and here and there adorned with
flourishing moustaches! A similar volume of American “Queens of Society,” of
which the frontispiece had been a beautiful engraving of Mrs. Martha Washington,
was entirely despoiled. Presentation copies of works by Victor Hugo and Thiers,
and a set of Byron given by Mr. Murray, were torn and injured. One precious
object, a brown paper first edition of “Hernani,” with Victor Hugo’s autograph
respects, did escape. It was found tossing in a cupboard in an attic, saved by
its
page: 201 shabby look and ancient date. But
piles of autograph letters from nearly every writer of eminence in France, and
from very many in England, carefully sorted, laid in a secretaire, and put aside
by the mistress of the house for a literary grandson, were hopelessly
sacrificed. They were found lying about in fragments in the garden, dirtied,
torn, and charred. It was decided by those who first returned to the home that
none of them could be picked up. They were shovelled aside and burnt.

Of the people who remained valiantly in the village a few strange and painful
incidents may be recorded. I have already said that the nuns were well and
respectfully treated. One of them having to go to Versailles for food and
medicine, told me she had been carefully and politely driven over by a soldier.
But when the beloved old curé was turned out of his presbytery and sent off to
Versailles by night, some wretched wag tied two of his hens round the old man’s
neck! The village doctor remained in his solitary house, and two officers were
billeted upon him.

The first of his military inmates cleared off all his cups and saucers, and he
laid in a fresh stock;
page: 202 two more officers
succeeded, and they also packed up and went off with his crockery, which seemed
to be an article in much request; the third time he received new inmates he said
he had no money, and they had to buy their dishes. When we came back the
following June we found that Dr. Lemaire, who had always been a particularly
trim, clean‐shaven elderly gentleman, had grown a long white beard. We looked
with wonder at this unprofessional adjunct, and he told us that “his officers”
had a trick (which sounded like a queer joke) of insisting on his procuring legs
of mutton, not only for their own consumption, but for other favoured friends.
When he assured them that he could get neither sheep nor special joints, they
frowned ferociously, and said, “Take him out and shoot him.” Six
times he was taken out, and respited! “After which,” said he, “I grew my white
beard, thinking that it might soften their hearts.” Finally, when peace was
made, the two last officers quartered upon him wished him good‐bye with
effusion, hoped to see him if he ever travelled so far as Berlin, and solemnly
presented their cards “for the ladies of the family” (who were safe at St.
page: 203 Valery). The old doctor replied, wrathfully,
“Oh! Ç’a non.” Which said in a certain
manner is very like an expletive!

During the later weeks of the siege a very malignant form of small‐pox became
epidemic at St. Germains, three miles off. A village woman caught it, and the
Prussians nailed her up in a cottage, and vowed instant vengeance on anybody who
should dare to break in. Our good Sœur Marie crept out at night and got soup and
medicine through the crevices. The patient recovered; and it is fair to say that
the officers had probably a shrewd notion that the nuns would manage the matter
somehow in spite of their prohibition. Not so fortunate was the village
innkeeper, a man of substance, whose chief customers had been wealthy Parisians
coming out to dine on Sundays under the spreading limes in a picturesque
courtyard. This well‐known inn was called the Tourne‐Bride. On the
first appearance of the Prussians, an officer requisitioned the whole of the
cellar. The wine was worth 10,000 francs, £400 of English money. Its loss and
the stoppage of the business meant ruin to the unfortunate man. He moved with
page: 204 his good wife into a small tavern two miles
away, but it broke his heart, and he died at the end of a year.

Endless were the stories told us by our humbler friends. One woman who took her
daughters off to her own family in Normandy, buried all her linen, which she had
no means of carrying away, in a great tub. Of course it was discovered and dug
up, and the linen was nowhere on her return. But the worst trouble of all
happened at Bougival when François Duberg was taken for cutting the telegraph
wires, tried by a court‐martial at Beauregard (a Chateau once in royal
occupation, and a nursery for the children of France), and shot on a field above
our house. He was a gardener by trade, carried no arms, but said, “he would do
it again.” At the obelisk raised to his memory on the road, a discourse is every
year pronounced in the early days of November. His wife, poor soul, went
mad.

I have now set down after the lapse of five and twenty years the things which I
saw and the things which were told me by my neighbours, and they are mostly such
as do not pertain to
page: 205 the great tragedies of
war. Of these there were no lack, but I mostly heard of them by letter or read
of them in print, and I have as yet strictly confined myself to my immediate
oral knowledge. But one young friend of mine, a Breton of a noble family which
sent five members to the field, contracted fever in the retreat from Orleans,
and got back to his wife and to his old mother, just to die. He left two orphan
children. Of our family, a cousin was dragged out dead from a heap at Sedan;
both our own young mobiles suffered severely in health, and our “Premier Prix”
felt the effect for years. Typhoid fever and lingering ill‐health are apt to
strike lads suddenly deprived of proper food and exposed to days and nights of
inclement weather. Another friend, a middle‐aged man, sent his young family
away, but remained in Paris with an elder daughter who was dying of consumption
and could not be moved. He nursed her to the end, and buried her, and sickened
himself of small‐pox, of which he died. His wife and younger children at St.
Valery knew nothing of what had happened for three weeks, and were in an agony
of suspense, receiving no more balloon letters from Paris. At last a
page: 206 cautious word reached them in a circuitous way from
Belgium, and the wife nearly lost her reason. This unfortunate man was
son‐in‐law to our excellent doctor, who, being himself outside Paris in our
village, could only write to his daughter and his own old wife that he had “no
news.”

Finally, of the very worst side of war a much younger medical man who afterwards
succeeded Dr. Lemaire spoke to me with shuddering horror. He had been employed
in an ambulance corps on the frontier, and at forty was an ageing grey‐haired
man. He published a volume of reminiscences which for ghastliness is
unsurpassed, for he possessed literary talent, in addition to medical skill. He
said to me, apropos of his book, “Of course I
would go through it again if necessary; but I look back on those weeks not only
with unimaginable horror, but with unutterable disgust.”

And this I believe was the real impression left by the Franco‐German war. France
certainly did not want it; and though Prince Bismark did want
if, and planned how best to prick on an excitable people, it is impossible to
page: 207 believe that the Germans wanted it. There
were practically no wrongs to revenge; or whatever wrongs had formerly been done
could be laid on the shoulders of that great Captain who cost us all so much
blood and treasure that even the son of Queen Louise of Prussia was not
justified in avenging them on peasants and shopkeepers sixty years after. War
between two highly‐civilized nations is not only cruel, but profoundly shocking,
and yet ever since the world’s literature began, there has existed a conspiracy
of silence in favour of recording only the heroic aspects of war; but the
reports of the English newspaper correspondents and the publication of even one
book such as Doctor Pierre Boyer’s, have brought the truth nearer to the
apprehension of general readers. A well‐dressed, intelligent woman whom I met in
a railway carriage, and who seemed to be engaged in some successful commerce,
said to me, with an expression of extreme disgust, apropos of the war, “Ce n’est plus dans
nos mœurs”; and this feeling obtained far and wide. The French
people did fight to the bitter end, and would do it again, but it would be with
a reluctant anger difficult to describe. It would be unnatural
page: 208 to expect that the Services, whose advancement and
reputation depend on getting some one to fight with them, should share this
feeling; but it is true of the vast masses of provincial French people, busy on
their own concerns, prosperous in affairs, doting on their children,
scrupulously particular in their dress, in their cooking, and in the conduct of
all their ceremonies, marriages, baptisms, and funerals—people who are extremely
civilized, from Boulogne in the north to Nice in the south, and who have no love
either for the anarchist or the long‐haired Bohemian—these comfortable millions,
though they will fight like lions when their blood is up, certainly feel that
the bloodshed, the dirt and destruction, and the many abominable incidents of
war ne sont plus dans leur mœurs.